Artikel mit dem Stichwort ‘The Wizard of Oz’

I started this article series with The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and arrived at Final Fantasy in the last installment because that’s the chronological order the works were released in and could have influenced one another. But me personally of course I started by playing Final Fantasy and then discovering the older works that had influenced it. And The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was one of the last sources I discovered, thanks to the Famitsū interview with NOJIMA.

Glory of Heracles I had discovered earlier and even without KITASE saying so in interviews the parallels between GoH3 and FFVII were very obvious. Not just that, the common theme of saving the planet made another influence on these games also very obvious. Let’s take a look at Gaia from Glory of Heracles III:

She literally is the planet all the characters from the game live on and like a kind mother she forgives the injury humans caused her.

Now let’s compare Gaia to Aerith from FFVII. Aerith’s name closely resembles the word earth, even would be an anagram save for one letter. She can talk to the planet, kind of speaks for and represents it.

She is slightly older than Cloud, by Japanese custom of relating everyone in terms of family members she would be an older sister which by the same logic hierarchically puts her on a similar level as a mother. Cloud even accidentally calls her mother in the movie Advent Children, her and Zack appearing like his parents, the older generation. Cloud comes to Aerith asking for forgiveness.

Now let’s take a look at Aerith’s first appearance in the game’s opening:

A similar pose, standing and holding her hand(s) to her chest, looking at the screen. A similar backdrop, a starry sky surrounding Gaia, sparks surrounding Aerith. The color green, decorating Gaia’s head and neck and lighting Aerith’s face.

I mentioned at the beginning of the first part that Final Fantasy VII was inspired by The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Let’s take a closer look at what writer NOJIMA Kazushige had to say about that connection and how the game actually draws upon this source work.

Final Fantasy director and producer KITASE Yoshinori repeatedly said in various interviews that he thinks former director and producer SAKAGUCHI chose NOJIMA to write FFVII because of his critical acclaimed work on Glory of Heracles 3. He also said he wanted NOJIMA to make FFVII as mysterious and surprising as that game.

Asked by Famitsū about how Glory of Heracles influenced FFVII, NOJIMA mentions The Girl Who Leapt Through time as another influence on FFVII. From the Famitsū interview from issue 1224, 2012 5/31:

About the Influence of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

Famitsū: Did you want to make FFVII into a mysterious story like the ones in the Glory of Heracles series, which you wrote before you came to Square?NOJIMA: Even before I could decide something like that KITASE-san had already asked me to write it that way (laughs). Even though it’s a pretty straight forward story I guess you could say it uses mysterious imagery. With this as the base plot I added ideas from the database server [into which the other staff members uploaded their suggestions]. Speaking about these ideas, since the team was reading my half finished scenario they kept adding new settings and drawings so we were influencing each other during the writing process.Famitsū: What kind of ideas did you use?

NOJIMA: Someone posted a setting about „mysterious men in black coats“, which I turned into the Sephiroth clones. I also borrowed imagery from movies. I especially took inspiration from The Girl Who Leapt Through Time starring HARADA Tomoyo. With FFVII, I wanted to recreate the impression of a „mysterious story“ you get from watching that movie. Of course I didn’t just completely copy lines and settings one to one. I simply borrowed phrases like „To the lab room on Saturday“ from the movie and using it as a motif turned it into „To the makō reactor 7 years ago“. …but no one seemed to notice that (laughs).

If you read the previous installments you of course know that going back to the lab room on Saturday, where it all started, going back to the root of the problem, or the Crisis Core in Final Fantasy VII terms, is what resolves the mystery of the story by TSUTSUI. The longer scene in FFVII in which the adapted quote comes up serves a very similar function and I want to revisit this scene to show how NOJIMA adapted motifs from TSUTSUI’s and ŌBAYASHI’s original works. Spoiler warning!

My first encounter with The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was actually the 1983 movie. It was the launch title of Nintendo’s Shiatā no ma (Theater room) video on demand service for the Wii and I watched it in December of 2009. It was written for the screen by KENMOCHI Wataru and directed by ŌBAYASHI Nobuhiko, starring HARADA Tomoyo as Kazuko. Apparently there’s also an English subtitled version called The Little Girl Who Conquered Time so you may want to seek that one out if you want to watch the movie yourself. Alternatively you could search Youtube for videos related to the movie. (mehr …)